— "It's either the beginning of New Orleans, or the end of New Orleans." A casual re... Questions loom large in Big Easy’
A casual remark, lobbed across the bar at the Bridge Lounge in the Lower Garden District, captures the apocalyptic mood hovering over this most buoyant of American cities.
New Orleans, the Big Easy, has become the Big Question Mark. Can — or should — it rebuild? Can it reinvent its economy? Will its leaders pursue alternative futures?
Three months after one of the worst natural disasters in American history, residents respond to these questions with shrugs. Where do you start when all systems have failed?
There was a small symbol of comeback Monday, as students began returning to the first regular public school to reopen. About 200 students were expected at Benjamin Franklin Elementary in the uptown area relatively unscathed by the storm.
But the sweep of Katrina's wrath has produced the ultimate disaster diagram. All the critical vectors — ecology, economics, education, race, politics, planning — are simultaneously in play, converging and colliding. Everything is connected. Push this, and that moves.
At an October meeting of the Bring New Orleans Back Commission, a group Mayor Ray Nagin created to lead the effort, co-chair Barbara Major asked, "How do you rebuild a city with equity? There is no manual."
For that reason, Nagin has pledged to "rebuild the entire city of New Orleans," meaning the Lower Ninth Ward as well as the exclusive Garden District.
But after three months, Congress has allocated only a small portion of the $250 billion in federal aid some Louisiana lawmakers want, partly out of wariness of the city's legendary history of corruption.
If solutions are elusive, the problems are not. Safety, housing, education, economic development, planning and politics are on everyone's list.
Topping the "must do" list is repairing the levees. Unless residents believe they will hold and history won't repeat itself, banks won't write mortgages, the government won't provide flood insurance, developers won't invest, and companies won't expand.
"The physical safety of New Orleans has to be established," says Allen Eskew, a New Orleans architect and urban planner, "and that means bringing the levees up to Category 5 status."
The Corps of Engineers says it will stabilize the levees by next summer's hurricane season, but, at best, that means protection from storms only up to Category 3. Experts say it will take $20 billion and more than 10 years to achieve Category 5 protection.
"It's a mistake to focus only on levees," says Mark Davis, executive director of the Coalition to Restore Coastal Louisiana. "Levees are only one part of a solution."
Davis estimates Katrina caused 50 years worth of land loss along the Gulf Coast in 24 hours, 100 square miles in Southeast Louisiana alone. Scientists say that with rising ocean temperatures, the number and intensity of hurricanes will increase and even greater losses can be expected.
History offers some clues to the city's future. The footprint of New Orleans in 1878 and the unflooded areas after Katrina are virtually identical. In 19th century New Orleans, development was confined to the higher ground on the east bank of the Mississippi (the Vieux Carre, the Garden District) while the areas that flooded in 2005 (the Lower Ninth Ward, New Orleans East and Lakeview) were uninhabited cypress swamp. Earlier residents knew what the river and the tides could do and built defensively.
All of which suggests an orderly retreat to higher ground. If New Orleans were merely an abstract planning problem, that is probably what would happen.
The city would write off New Orleans East, the Lower Ninth Ward and parts of Lakeview, compensate and relocate the property owners, and turn the abandoned land into parks, wetlands and playing fields. The goal would be to reinforce the historic core of the city, with its dense, mixed-use development laid out along transit lines.
The red lining proposition is being floated — discreetly — at City Hall. The Rand Corp., a well-regarded think tank, has reportedly volunteered to do demographic analysis on which neighborhoods are most likely to bounce back. But everyone is nervous about it.
Joseph Canizaro, a major developer and chairman of the planning committee of the mayor's commission, thinks increasing density is "smarter than continuing to build farther and farther out." He also thinks discussion of red lining is premature.
But New Orleans is the least abstract of cities. Almost 80 percent of its residents were born there, higher than any major city in America. With the pull of home so powerful, what seems like a logical planning proposition becomes a political nightmare.
"Our No. 1 priority is housing, our No. 2 is housing, and after that, at No. 3, we'd put housing." So spoke Vice Adm. Thad Allen, the Gulf Coast director of FEMA.
But what type of housing does New Orleans need? FEMA has set up thousands of trailers in empty lots, but trailer parks are no solution to the housing crisis.
"We have to look closely at our traditional neighborhoods," says Patty Gay, executive director of the Preservation Resource Center of New Orleans. "We have a beautiful plan from the 19th century that respects the topography, a grid that isn't boring and that follows transit. New development should respect that pattern."
She and others point out that older houses generally fared better in Katrina than new ones — because they were better built, with better materials, and because they followed certain pragmatic vernacular conventions, such as a raised first floor. The more you think about New Orleans' climate, soil conditions and lifestyle, preservationists argue, the more you are drawn to the architecture that has been around for centuries.
Yet housing is only one part of the rebuilding story. New Orleans infrastructure is a wreck and has to be fixed — everything from sewage plants and electrical grids to its light rail system. The lack of viable rail transit contributed to the Katrina evacuation nightmare.
There's so much to do, yet it needs to fit into the city's unique culture. "That's why people come here," architect Robert Cangelosi said. "It's not Disneyland, and it's not Anywhere, USA."
This is cache, read story here